Email reputation is something that all email marketers must be mindful of. Due to the prevalence of spammers and scammers, it's critical that you avoid behavior that could get your domain flagged for being a spammy sender.
Email Authentication
You authenticate the email platforms that are allowed to send on behalf of your domain by adding records to your DNS. This is something that we are happy to do for you. Send an email to support@vipecloudms.wpenginepowered.com to schedule a call.
To learn more about email authentication, click here.
Email Reputation Score
Your email reputation score can't be officially looked up, but it can be estimated based on best practices. You can find your estimated score in VipeCloud on the mass email page and marketing dashboard.
This is calculated based on your activity in the previous 3-week rolling window. It is calculated based on your ratio of successfully delivered emails vs negative outcomes, which include bounces, unsubscribes, and spam reports. You can find a breakdown of these in the "issues" report for each mass email send.
Getting Started Sending
It is best to start small. A small send with issues is always preferable to a big send with issues. If your send does well, you can always add on top of it with an additional send. Regardless of your domain's history and the list that you are sending to, this is the safest approach.
If your domain doesn't have a history of sending a volume of emails, and you don't have a list that has been recently worked, you should consider sending to just a couple dozen contacts. You can then review the results and proceed accordingly.
It's not uncommon for the first send to result in a significant drop in your reputation. This is because you aren't starting with a solid base of successful sends to outweigh bounces that are incurred. Additionally, if it's a list that you haven't been actively using, there will be a higher number of bounces compared with later sends where the bounces have already been weeded out.
Ramping Up Sending
The way that one ramps up sending should largely be dictated by your reputation score and what you know about the quality of your list. If your score is below 85% and you don't have a solid base of sending in the last 3 weeks, you should consider a more conservative approach.
If your score is in the mid-90s, you have a big base of quality sending in the last 3 weeks and you are sending to a good list, then that's a good sign that you can afford to increase your sending.
Essentially, your score + the track record of your lists can guide how you do or do not increase your sending.
Consistent Sending Is Best
It is suspicious behavior for a domain to suddenly break out of its normal sending habits. So, if a domain that normally just sends several dozen operational emails per day suddenly sends 5k emails in a blast, this will likely be deemed spammy behavior.
This should be avoided whenever possible. Your best bet is to send smaller volumes on a more consistent basis. For instance, rather than sending 5k emails once per month, send 250 emails M-F.
Use VipeCloud's Advanced Mass Emailer Whenever Possible
The Advanced Mass Emailer (AME) makes it easy to maintain a consistent schedule of sending emails. It slows your sending down to 1 email per minute. This makes a mass email look a lot more like operational 1:1 sending.
Since AMEs can be paused mid-send, it allows you to stop a bad send in its tracks. Therefore it maximizes your deliverability and consistent sending while mitigating the damage of a send that goes poorly.